Review/Television; 'Saturday Night Live,' With Andrew Dice Clay

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''I want to say Happy Mother's Day to my mother and every other mother out there,'' said Andrew Dice Clay at the end of his appearance as host of NBC's ''Saturday Night Live.'' Making mothers and other women happy has never been one of his priorities before, of course. It was the unrelenting misogyny of the comedian's enormously popular stand-up routine that led Nora Dunn, a regular cast member, and Sinead O'Connor, the scheduled musical guest, to boycott Saturday's show. But even misogynists have moms, and he sounded like he meant it. Can it be he can really act?

It's impossible to tell from his ''Saturday Night Live'' appearance, which was apparently meant to be the next shrewd step in the mainstreaming of Andrew Dice Clay. With two movies (a comedy and a concert film) coming out this summer, he can no longer afford to spit out expletives on live television, the act that got him banned from MTV and bought him just the kind of bad-boy publicity that has propelled his career. But instead of testing whether he can be more than a one-note performer, the show turned into a media event that gnawed at the controversy in one toothless skit after another.

The most clever was the opening sketch, a parody of ''It's a Wonderful Life,'' with Mr. Clay threatening to throw himself off a bridge because of the fuss about his appearing as host. His guardian devil reveals what ''Saturday Night Live'' would have been without him: Ms. Dunn would have shown up and been squashed when Ms. O'Connor's amplifier fell on her. A distraught Ms. O'Connor would never show her nearly shaved head to sing in public again. ''That's too bad; she was a cute bald chick,'' says Mr. Clay in the Jimmy Stewart role.

This mild self-mocking does not begin to suggest the offensive tirade of sexism that is typical of Mr. Clay's stand-up routines, and anyone who turned on ''Saturday Night Live'' without having seen him at his most vile might have wondered what the fuss was about. His usual comments about women are mostly unprintable, but a typical one involves whiling away time in line at the bank by molesting the woman in front of him. The chain-smoking, leather-jacketed ''Diceman'' is clearly a persona, but it is a role without any redeeming irony.

When Mr. Clay was briefly heckled during his opening monologue on ''Saturday Night,'' though, his response was to call the heckler ''the type of guy that hangs out in the men's room'' inhaling the aromas all day. This may walk the line of network television standards, but it's not the kind of scabrous dialogue that provokes boycotts. And given the chance to skewer the protesters and to parody the Clay image, the writers could do no better than an ''Afterschool Special'' with Mr. Clay as a father giving a sex talk to his son, with certain slang terms bleeped out.

Mr. Clay and the writers must have thought they were capitalizing on the controversy, instead of being sunk by it, but they made the wrong choice. The one truly funny episode was ''Ridiculous Bull,'' a black-and-white-parody of ''Raging Bull'' with Mr. Clay doing a mean impersonation of Robert De Niro as the out-of-shape boxer Jake LaMotta saying, ''Hit me with the sledgehammer, Joey. I'm your older brother, Joey, hit me with the refrigerator,'' in Mr. De Niro's nervous, repetitious delivery. The Diceman disappeared and a comic actor took over, raising new questions. Does Andrew Dice Clay have a future in the mainstream after all? And if he does, should women ever forgive him for the way he got there?

A version of this review appears in print on May 14, 1990, on Page C00016 of the National edition with the headline: Review/Television; 'Saturday Night Live,' With Andrew Dice Clay. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe